Mmmmmm....dinner!

So lately I've been on a strict recipe only kick for cooking. I am planning meals a week in advance and ONLY buying ingredients for those meals. Well, here's one that surprised both me and my husband tonight. I planned this week to do meatball subs (which we both love) one night and then tonight we did a Cheesy Meatball soup. The soup is the surprise...lol. I made the biggest batch of meatballs tonight and put half in the fridge for tomorrow and the rest went into the crockpot. But here's the list of ingredients for the soup:

(I didn't measure, it's one of those soups that you can stretch as far as you need to!)

Approx. 4 cups hot water
1 or 2 packets of onion soup mix (depending on how strong you want it)
about 2 ribs of celery chopped
1 large carrot sliced
1/2 large onion diced
2 medium potatoes chopped small
1 cup frozen corn (or canned if you prefer)
1 jar of processed cheese sauce (like the kind you make dip out of...but not the salsa one)
and as many meatballs as you'd like (I did about a dozen meatballs, maybe more I didn't keep track...lol) **make sure the meatballs are cooked first...the recipe said to brown them in a frying pan first then let them finish cooking in the soup, but I fully cooked mine in the oven because I was reserving some for another meal...

put all veggies, water and soup mix in crock pot on high, wait for it to get hot all the way through then add the cheese and stir well. Add in meatballs, and keep cooking on high for about 3-4 hours until all veggies are done. If you would like a thicker soup (more chowder consistency, ladle out a bowl full of just the liquid and stir in two or three tablespoons of flour and whisk vigorously, then spoon it back into the rest of the soup and whisk again, do this as many times as you'd like until you reach desired thickness.) I must add at this point that my favorite condiment is butter, and I added about three tablespoons of butter just before serving, it gives such a rich smoothness to soup!

and viola, cheesy soupy goodness. It's actually quite yummy, and if you double cook like I do you can have left over meatballs for another meal later in the week or freeze the rest of them and have them for another time.